Thursday, January 31, 2013

An adult Ring-billed Gull with gizzard shad. Like a kid in a candy shop. This and the following photos were made last Saturday at Cleveland's East 72nd Street park on Lake Erie. There, the shad pile up in the wake of a power plant's warm water effluvia like scaley locusts in an aquatic wheat field. Unfortunately for the nonnative shad, most die and are consigned to be expelled as gull guano.

At most seasons and in most areas in Ohio, the Ring-billed Gull is, if not the default gull, certainly the most common. This adult in flight shows its clean white tail, and mostly black outer primaries. Of course, that black ring around the bill is a pretty good clue to its identity. The bird is in winter plumage, as indicated by the light brown flecking on the head and neck. As it enters breeding condition in spring, those areas will become bright white.

This is a "second cycle" Ring-billed Gull. When "cycle" is applied to a gull, it indicates a distinct plumage sequence within a series of molts. All gulls take multiple years to attain full adult plumage, which is one of the reasons that they're confusing to identify. Different ages of the same species can look like completely different species.

Ring-billed gulls require about three years to achieve fully adult plumage, as in the birds in the previous two photos. This second cycle animal differs from an adult in its almost entirely black wingtips, and the prominent black terminal tail band.

This is the largest gull that you'll see on Lake Erie, or anywhere in the world. It is a Great Black-backed Gull, and one of these bruisers weighs three times as much as a Ring-billed Gull. The "GBBG" in the photo is a first cycle bird - mostly brown but showing the semblance of a dark mantle on the back. The head and neck are suffused with a dirty brown wash. Note the gargantuan bill.

I suspect that this Great Black-backed Gull is a second cycle bird. Its mantle is darkening up, and shows less of he checkerboard pattern caused by the copious white flecking of a younger bird.

No problem telling an adult Great Black-backed Gull, with its sooty-black upperparts and giant size. These birds are so large that nonbirders sometimes mistake them for Bald Eagles. The individual in this photo would be at least four years old - it takes that many years to achieve fully adult plumage. If it makes it to this stage, it could live for a long time. The oldest known wild bird lived for nearly three decades, and some of the large gull species probably manage to survive for far longer than that.

Big, pale, and ghostly, a Glaucous Gull sticks out like a sore thumb. This is another big boy, second in size and scale only to the Great Black-backed Gull. The Glaucous dwarfs the adult Ring-billed Gull directly behind it. Most of the other birds in the shot are Herring Gulls of various ages. The Herring Gull complex is an interesting group, and we found a real oddball Herringwhatever in this crowd. More on that later.

This is a first cycle Glaucous Gull, with dingy white plumage throughout, no obvious gray mantle differentiation, and a dark eye. Glaucous are among the "white-winged gulls", which includes the Iceland Gull. These Arctic-breeding birds of the far north lack, or mostly lack, dark pigment in the wingtips as can be seen on this bird.

They don't call 'em white-winged gulls for nothing. Glaucous Gulls are always a treat to find. While they are regular along Lake Erie in winter, we don't get very many. They're big, fierce animals capable of domineering the lesser gulls. This is another "four-year" gull - like the Great Black-backed Gull, it takes a Glaucous that long to reach maturity. This was the only of its kind at East 72nd on this day, so I was unable to make images of other age classes. But they look large, white, and cool no matter their age.

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About Me

I am a lifelong Ohioan who has made a study of natural history since the age of eight or so - longer than I can remember! A fascination with birds has grown into an amazement with all of nature, and an insatiable curiosity to learn more. One of my major ambitions is to get more people interested in nature. The more of us who care, the more likely that our natural world will survive.

About the photos, and permission to use

All photographs on these web pages are the exclusive property of Jim McCormac, and are protected under United States and International copyright laws. The photographs may not be copied, reproduced, stored, distributed or manipulated without written permission. All rights are reserved.

If you contact me requesting free photos, the reply may be long in coming :-)

I've been taking photographs for a few decades, but never became fully interested and engaged in photography until 2003. That's when I got my first digital camera. Since then, photography has become a passion and a steadily growing addiction. If you delve back far enough into this blog, you will see photos that were made with a variety of Panasonic point & shoot bridge cameras. Then came a Canon Rebel DSLR, followed by a Nikon D7000. I've since returned to Canon, and use their gear almost exclusively. My camera bodies are a Canon 5D Mark III, which is an awesome full-frame sensor camera, and a Canon 7D Mark II. The latter is a 1.6 crop factor camera, and I use it almost exclusively for birds and distant wildlife.

The lens bag includes the following Canon lenses: 100mm f/2.8L-macro; the sensational but bizarre MP-E 65 mega-macro; a 180mm f/3.5 macro; a 16-35mm f/4L wide-angle; a 50mm f/1.4; a 100-400 f4.5/5.6 II; and a 500mm f/4L II, sometimes used with a 1.4 extender (which makes it a 700mm). I've also got a Tamron 70-200mm and Sigma 24mm Art (great lenses!). I do lots of macro, and my typical flash gear is the Canon Twin-Lite setup. If the gear needs three-legged stabilization, it is mounted on an Induro tripod, attached to an Induro Gimbal head. Finally, I've got a GoPro Hero, which is fully waterproof and can be used for underwater work. Sometimes I even use the camera or video feature on my iPhone 5S smartphone - it's amazing how good phone cameras have become.

Speaking, guiding gigs 2016

NOTE: Click on listed events for details (inmost cases).

January 16, 2016 - Ohio Ornithological Society's annual winter raptor day at the Wilds, Muskingum County, Ohio. Leading field trip.